The Montreux Jazz Festival recently presented its annual two-week showcase at Lake Geneva, offering200,000 visitors from around the world performances as wide ranging as Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, Lenny Kravitz and Lionel Richie, Toto, and Carlos Santana.
In the thick of the action is the festival’s Sound Coordinator, David Weber – and a slew of DiGiCo mixing consoles.
DiGiCo has maintened a major involvement with the event for eight years, providing consoles to all the festival’s venues. In the flagship Stravinsky, an SD7 holds court at FOH, with an SD5 complementing it at monitor position; in the legendary Music Club (formerly the Miles Davis Hall), it’s an SD5 at FOH, and an SD10 on monitors; there’s an SD10-24 in the Jazz Club; and an SD8 sits outside at FOH position for Music in the Park. Further SD8s, 9s, 10s, and SD11s are also scattered among the Jazz Lab, Rock Cave and even Montreux Palace.
Two major DiGiCo advocates involved at this year’s event were Laurie Quigley and Rob Mailman. Quigley works FOH for Lenny Kravitz, and Mailman (also GM of touring for San Diego-based rental house, Sound Image), does the same job for Carlos Santana. ‘For me, it’s a case of the wetter the better, as that’s what Lenny wants,’ says Quigley during soundcheck. ‘We’ve had the curtains taken down for the show. It’s a tricky room, the Stravinsky, and Lenny is very particular about his reverbs.’
In line with Kravitz’s love of old-school audio, Quigley carries a wealth of classic outboard on the road, and also uses the internal processing within the console, which he rates highly.
‘I am still very hands-on with the console, one because I love to mix, and two, because there’s too much going on during a Lenny show not to be hands-on,’ he explains. ‘But because so many channels are not being used on certain songs, having the snapshots is a godsend, and the facilities on the SD7 are fantastic for that; I basically snapshot the mutes and faders, so I’m not changing the effects sends on every song.’
‘I hope they put the curtains back in for my show tomorrow night,’ says Mailman. He is also on an SD7, and has been for some time: ‘We have a strong relationship with DiGiCo at Sound Image, and I love the versatility of their consoles. Everything is where it needs to be, you can operate it as you would an analogue board very comfortably, and the sound quality is phenomenal.’
Quigley warns that ‘it might get loud’. And it does. As the last chords of ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way?’ die away and the crowd begins to disperse, Quigley breaks into a wide smile: ‘I told you it’d get loud, didn’t I?’
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